Airbus, battling fresh production setbacks on its jets, was a representative for Diverse Company of the Year at the 2025 National Diversity Awards in September. Now, the company is seeing stocks fall after even more recalls and grounded airplanes.
The National Diversity Award Ceremony, held on September 19, honored UK organizations that were “advancing equality in race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation.” Airbus even sponsored the event alongside other big corporations, including Amazon, AutoTrader, and OVO.
The award ceremony’s website praises Airbus for its “DEI” focus, writing, “At Airbus diversity and inclusion are the heart of the organisation, supported by a global Inclusion & Diversity team, Employee Resource Groups, and Inclusion Champions dedicated to fostering self-expression and offering training on inclusion and neurodiversity…Airbus is actively addressing the industry’s gender imbalance through hiring and company-wide targets.”
In the UK, Head of Talent Acquisition Jacqui Chan oversees diverse hiring across four countries for Airbus. She also happened to be the employee they chose as their ambassador at the “DEI”-heavy award ceremony.
A video clip of Chan’s speech, posted to X by Libs of TikTok, shows her saying, “What matters the most is the fact that we are recognizing organizations who are doing their best in making lasting, sustainable change, in attracting and supporting our diverse brothers and sisters.”
Airbus now allegedly aims for 25% women in executive roles by 2025, up from around 12.8% in 2024.
In the Airbus in the UK Gender Pay Gap Report 2024, it states “Between the reporting dates of 6 April 2023 to 5 April 2024, 23% of recruits across all divisions were women. Which is an active increase…but shows that we still have more work to do.”
This spotlight on “DEI” goals for Airbus doesn’t obscure their escalating challenges, especially with their A320 plane.
On November 28, Airbus issued an “Alert Operators Transmission” alert for around 6,000 airplanes, over half of the company’s “narrow body” fleet, after a JetBlue A320 incident on October 30, found that solar radiation could corrupt flight control data.
Additionally, thousands of passengers experienced Thanksgiving delays, with American Airlines issuing a report claiming that they finally fixed all 209 jets affected by the problem on November 30, per CNBC.
CEO Guillaume Faury posted on LinkedIn November 29, writing, per CNBC: “The fix required on some #A320 aircraft has been causing significant logistical challenges and delays since yesterday. … Our teams are working around the clock to support our operators and ensure these updates are deployed as swiftly as possible to get planes back in the sky and resume normal operations.”
Days later, Airbus disclosed a supplier quality issue with metal fuselage panels on dozens more A320s. In a statement obtained by Reuters, the company noted: “Airbus confirms it has identified a quality issue affecting a limited number of A320 metal panels. The source of the issue has been identified, contained and all newly produced panels conform to all requirements.”
Airbus must now meet several large production delivery goals in 2025 and 2026, which only adds pressure to the company’s recent problems.
On December 1, Airbus shares fell as much as 11%. Vertical Research Partners published a note that day reading: “It was already a big ask for Airbus to hit that 2025 delivery number, and so these fuselage issues could not have come at a worse time.”